


When everybody loves you, you can never be lonely

by gloss



Category: The Office (US)
Genre: Christmas Party, Drunkenness, F/F, F/M, season nine was really hard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-15
Updated: 2013-11-15
Packaged: 2018-01-01 14:50:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1045210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/pseuds/gloss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pam is living in the past.</p><p><b>contains:</b> inebriation, intimations of infidelity</p>
            </blockquote>





	When everybody loves you, you can never be lonely

**Author's Note:**

> Goes AU midway through s9's Christmas party.
> 
> I started this in part for the "drunkfic" square in [](http://trope-bingo.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**trope_bingo**](http://trope-bingo.dreamwidth.org/) , but it's a downer instead of a tropey romp. Also it was supposed to be for [](http://aphrodite-mine.dreamwidth.org/profile)[](http://aphrodite-mine.dreamwidth.org/)**aphrodite_mine** but see above re: downer.  
>  Thanks to G. for brainstorming and beta.

After Jim leaves for Philly, Pam stays at the Christmas party until it's over. It's a party! She's in the spirit! She _closes_ that party. She outdrinks _Meredith_ , that's how hardcore she is.

(It is entirely possible -- probable, even, though she can never quite keep the distinction straight at the best of times, let alone sloshed to the gills -- that Meredith has been drinking since the morning and left the glühwein to lightweights like Pam, keeping instead to her preferred overproof vodka. Who knew! Not Pam!)

"Merry Christmas, Dwight," she says again, trying to grab his hand from where it rests on the Trans Am's gearstick.

He evades her. "Yes, thank you. You've said as much thirteen times now."

He's still wearing his Schnicklefritz get-up. Under the streaked and grimy makeup, he looks weary. Even sad.

"Dwight!" She twists in her seat, fighting the seatbelt, so she can lean against the door. "Dwight!"

"Yes, Pam?"

"Dwight!" She swats his shoulder. "Yo, Schrutecakes! Merry Christmas!"

He sort-of smiles. Not a real smile, but not nothing, either. _Not-thing_ : she just got that. Wow. Language is _amazing_.

"Merry Christmas, Pam," he says as they pull into her driveway. He doesn't unclasp his seatbelt or even turn off the engine. He does smile at her, through the wispy John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt beard, but it doesn't reach his eye.

This is no way to kick off Party Two: The Joyening.

She tells him as much, but Dwight keeps his hands on the wheel at 10 and 2.

"Party's long over," he says.

She laughs. "That's what she said."

He looks at her, big sad moon face, droopy eyes, sticky greasepaint, but stays quiet. Gradually her giggle-hiccups die away.

She's suddenly aware of how _hot_ she feels. Not sexy-hot. Flushed, kind of nauseous hot. Bad hot.

She hasn't been sexy-hot in a long time. Maybe that's why Jim went to Philadelphia. City of Brotherly Love, emphasis on _love_ , way preferable to Scranton, Home of Homely Nags. It all makes perfect sense, finally, at last.

She starts to cry. Dwight doesn't move.

"I thought you were coming inside," she says. That sounds dirty, too. "Oh. That's what... _I_ said. Ha."

She's not coming on to Dwight, is she?

Oh, God.

He calls after her, but somehow -- drunk magic! The mystery of glühwein! -- she's out of the car and running up the path and her door is right there smirking at her with its half-finished wreath. (She meant to finish it last weekend with CeCe, to establish what would become over the decades a treasured mother-daughter ritual, but CeCe insisted on licking the frosted pinecones and Pam spilled the glitter all over the kitchen and maybe it simply wasn't to be.)

Her breath comes in great big white clouds, like speech balloons in comic books. She can't read these, though. She has no idea what she might be saying.

Inside, she's hot again (gross-hot, never sexy-hot) and it's too dark and super quiet. She goes around turning on all the lights and slowly stripping out of her work clothes. Normally, she'd put on a tee and yoga pants, but no one's here.

No one's here. She's all alone, and it's more than the glühwein lighting up her sense of melodrama.

All alone, and by God, she _feels_ it, all the way under her skin, in the pounding of her ears, the creak of her step on the godawful linoleum (still dusted with glitter; she's never going to get it all up, not even if she were Mr. Dyson Vacuum himself).

Clearly, the solution is another drink -- hell-LO, Cabernet, aren't you looking bright and rosy this evening? -- and some music to drown out her heartbeat.

"Tunes," she announces in the middle of the living room. Her driveway is dark and empty. Merry Christmas, Dwight, don't let the Cousin Moses bite. "Tunes, tuneage, banana-fanna-fo-funeage. Tuneage."

If she had a futuristic robot house, it would start playing her favorite song _right now_.

But she has a crappy little non-robot house with mold in the basement (why shell out for a home inspection? We're family!) and whose mortgage payment is a week late. If she were a hotshot graphic designer at Bruce Mau or Wieden Kennedy, she could get a robot house, probably. At least a Roomba or a Dyson.

She's crying again. Her eyes burn and there is an incredible amount of snot, pretty much a _torrent_ , leaking out of her nose. When she goes to blow her nose on her sleeve, she realizes she's just in her bra and undies. With snot all over her elbow now, holding a wine bottle in her other hand.

Music. She really needs music.

Jim has the iPod, so she turns the volume all the way up on the laptop.

It's really not the beautiful blast of music she was hoping for. There's no classic Maxell ad happening here. No one's getting blown away any time soon.

The sound is just a tinny whine. Adele should not be reduced to this, nor any of the other fine, fierce ladies in "Pam's Chick Tunes" folder. But she can't find the remote for the stereo, and, anyway, she's terrible with Jim's stereo, always has been. Now that she's thinking of it, why is it still _Jim's_ stereo? Why would she think of it that way? Shouldn't it be theirs? Hers? Shouldn't she know how to work it just as well as he does? She likes music. It's not like she hates music and joy and all the beautiful things in the world. She's not this huge buzzkill, out to ruin everything.

She's not _Angela_.

She didn't use to be, anyway.

She shuffles through the pile of mail on the table. She's been ignoring it, for lots of reasons, all of them reminders of her shortcomings -- short on prompt payment, short to never on sending out holiday cards. One of these days, she'd really like to surprise everyone, starting with herself.

The first card she opens wishes them Happy Happy Joy Joy from Karen Filipelli and her son, Aldo. Karen's the elf, making a big TA-DA! face as she leans in behind a very grave-looking little boy in a Santa costume.

Aldo has Karen's big hazel eyes. Not that you can see that in this particular picture, thanks to the fluffy white eyebrows and over-large hat, but she and Karen are friends on Facebook now, so Pam has seen lots of pictures of Aldo. He's really cute, not just in that automatic way she has learned to say about other people's children: compliments are both currency and lubricant. If CeCe ever decides to stop biting other kids' butts, Pam might even hear some compliments, too.

"Isn't Aldo the guy Mary Worth killed?" Jim asked, cracking up, when they got the birth announcement. Pam didn't get the reference; Karen explained it to her once in a Facebook chat. (She named her son after her grandfather, not a sadsack, banal villain in a C-rate newspaper comic, but said to be sure to thank Jim for thinking so highly of her maternal instincts.)

Karen would probably love Philly.

Pam finishes the wine and wipes her nose on her bare arm. Shawn Colvin's playing now. God, she used to listen to this on cassette so much it started to wear down. But only alone or on her Walkman, because Roy hated women's voices. All of them, apparently, because every single female singer was a Lilith Fair lesbian manhater.

She looks around for her phone, overcome with the sudden conviction that she should text Roy and ask if he still thinks that. And does it apply to someone like Diana Ross? Or only thick-ankled white women singers?

Her phone's nowhere to be seen, which probably is a good thing for the time being. She heads to the kitchen for another bottle of wine. Why stop now? She's on a roll!

On the way, she detours into the garage. It's freezing in here; she has to hop from foot to foot, but maybe her luck is turning, because she finds her old bright yellow Walkman in only the second box she opens. And there are cassettes, lots of them, so now it's only a matter of digging out one battery from the kitchen drawer and liberating another from Philip's Leapfrog Reader. (He mostly chews on the thing -- her children are remarkably oral and it's probably her fault for not breastfeeding longer -- so he won't miss it.)

She tries to clip the Walkman to the waistband of her underwear, but everything sags dangerously low, so she keeps it in her hand, awkward as this is.

The tape grunts and resumes in the middle of Counting Crows: We all want to be big big stars... Win! She still has a crush on Adam Duritz, no lie.

Back at the computer, she shuts off the whiny trickle of music, then finds herself checking her email and Facebook without meaning to. Hip people are on social networks she's never heard of; Alex recently sent her an invite to the beta of Kernr, a network of fontographers. Not-sexy-hot moms like her, though, they belong on Facebook and Pinterest. (Pinterest exhausts her, honestly. So much perfection, constantly, everywhere.)

Speak of the lady devil, Karen just updated: when the snow's taller than your kid, maybe it's time to move.

 **Hi!!!!!!!** , Pam types, squinting at the screen.

That's a lot of exclamation points there, Karen replies. Was there a sale?

volunme=enTHUSiasm

I see.

merry xmas!!!!11 <\-- enthusiastic

And to you. :)

thx for hte card. I haven't done ours yet.

Oh, yeah. It seemed funny at the time, but...

SUOER FUNNY + cute!!!1

Aww. Thank you.

There's nothing else to say. She fiddles with the volume wheel on the Walkman and chews her lip.

She has always been acutely -- _painfully_ \-- conscious of the shorter-than-short lifespan of most conversations. They're like bugs, fluttering to life, existing so briefly, then falling dead and cluttering up your windowsills. It's even worse in text -- well, no, it isn't, because in person you have to endure _seeing_ the other person lose interest and seek an escape from you. In text, there's just... _nothing_. Void, silence.

She swigs more wine, turns the volume all the way up on JUNIOR YEAR MEGA-MIX! so she can't hear herself think (excellent, Mighty Mighty Bosstones' "The Impression That I Get"! Pam, too, has never had to knock on wood. [That is a lie, but it helps with singing along.]), then messages Karen.

  
rmember mistletoe  
  
---  
  
Is that a question or a comment?  
  
  
what is w/you & punctaution  
(that is also a question)  
??????????  
  
  
I just value clarity.  
  
  
  
No wonder she's so professional and successful and good at everything she does. Pam's fingers tippety-tap over the home keys without hitting hard enough to type.

  
Pam?  
  
---  
  
The room -- the whole house -- is bright. Brighter than day, and warm as blood. Pam hunches into herself, lifts her fingers, sucks her lower lip.

The Walkman makes that churning whirr. The tape's hit the end.

  
Yes, I remember the mistletoe.  
  
---  
  
me 2.  
  
  
too.  
  
  
Pam exhales, but she hadn't been holding her breath, so she just gets really lightheaded and then her stomach starts to hurt.

  
im drunk. also notsexyhot.  
  
---  
  
Sexy hot?  
  
  
  
She can _hear_ Karen saying that, lightly, one elegant eyebrow lifting, her dark lips curling in faint amusement.

Her dark lips, sticky-salty with margarita; matching nail polish, nails digging into Pam's shoulder, her scalp.

  
u kiss gr8  
  
---  
  
Thanks. So you said at the time, as I recall.  
  
  
She still hasn't reached that mythical point of drunkenness where you feel perfectly clear and serene and calm. And confident.

Maybe that's a hurricane, not drunkenness. Or what happens when you realize you should stop drinking? Whatever it is, she's not going to find it.

  
shd do it again. really wnt to.  
  
---  
  
  
Karen doesn't reply.

Who could blame her?

Pam takes off her headphones; they tangle in her hair and she needs to rip at the end to get them free. She shuts the laptop and pushes the chair back until it hits the edge of the rug.

She sits very still, hands in her lap. Her heart is going so fast and she's dizzy, even though she's sitting down.

Eventually, she's going to get up. She's already cold; she should drink some water so she doesn't wake up with her worst hangover since the '05 Dundies. She needs to turn out all the lights again and check the locks and climb into bed.

She's just going to sit here for a little bit longer. Sit and shiver and wait this -- whatever _this_ is, sobriety or regret or loneliness or guilt -- out.

Her phone is thudding, vibrating, somewhere in the hall. So that's where it is. She should answer it.

Later.  



End file.
